The Sarah Palin of 2016 joins the original 2008 version at a Town Hall in Wisconsin yesterday (Kamil Krzaczynski / Reuters)

I made one very bad call about the 2016 election, which I quickly confessed! It was the same bad call most other people made: that Donald Trump’s lack of political experience and knowledge would make him the Herman Cain of this campaign cycle, and he would not get this far in the race. (I’m sticking by my call that he is not going to become president.)

To be fair, I made a very good call two cycles earlier concerning the Trump of that era, Sarah Palin. As soon as her selection was announced as John McCain’s running mate in 2008, I wrote in this space (in the middle of the night, from China) that despite her then-red-hot popularity she would be a huge liability for the ticket. Why? Because running for national office is a lot, lot harder than it looks. And if you come to it with no experience, you are simply guaranteed to make a lot of gaffes.

Let’s go to the charts. Here’s what I wrote when McCain announced her as his choice:

Unless you have seen it first first-hand, as part of the press scrum or as a campaign staffer, it is almost impossible to imagine how grueling the process of running for national office is… The candidates have to answer questions and offer views roughly 18 hours a day, and any misstatement on any topic can get them in trouble. Why do candidates so often stick to a stump speech that they repeat event after event and day after day? Because they've worked out the exact way to put their positions on endless thorny issues -- Iraq, abortion, the Middle East, you name it -- and they know that creative variation mainly opens new complications.

You can see where I am going with this, after Trump’s misadventures of the past week:

The point about every one of those issues is that there is a certain phrase or formulation that might seem perfectly innocent to a normal person but that can cause a big uproar. Without going into the details, there is all the difference in the world between saying "Taiwan and mainland China" versus "Taiwan and China." The first is policy as normal; the second -- from an important US official -- would light up the hotline between DC and Beijing.

So back in 2008 I was arguing that in just two months on the campaign trail, no beginner in national-level campaigning, like Palin, could learn all the lingo on these issues. Thus gaffes were sure to ensue, as they did. (This accurate call is all the more heroic in retrospect, since we’ve now learned that I was practically at death’s door, in China, when I filed that post! Ah the plucky life of the reporter.)

***

Until this point in Trump’s campaign, he would seem to be the walking refutation of all such established wisdom. Gaffes? Never heard of ‘em! I’ll say whatever comes to mind, and the crowds will cheer for more!

The difference we’ve seen, with Trump’s sequential fumbles on abortion policy, and nuclear policy, and war-and-peace in Europe and Asia, etc is that until the past ten days he’s managed to be “outrageous” mainly on personal-performance matters. He’s been (as often noted) a figure straight from pro wrestling. He is not Rush Limbaugh called from behind the microphone; he’s Howard Stern. You can’t make fun of John McCain for his war record, can you??? Trump could! And did. You can’t mock your opponents to their face — Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted — and be taken seriously, can you??? Trump could! And did. The equally outrageous Howard Stern-style policy claims he made — let’s build a wall! and make Mexico pay for it — somehow didn’t register as “gaffes,” precisely because there is no chance whatsoever he could actually deliver on them. It was all in the fashion of pre-bout preening before a wrestling match: “I’m gonna smash him down so hard he’ll be cryin’ for his Mama, and the only words he’ll remember will be Wee, wee, wee all the way home!”

The setup of the GOP “debates” so far allowed Trump to get away with this, at least with his base. The “point” of each debate was to see who could bully or disconcert whom. And in his omnipresent “interviews,” Trump also got away with shunting any question into a discussion of how strong his polls were, how successful he had been, and how great things would be when he was in charge. Leading to this Onion-esque but apparently serious emission yesterday:

Why didn’t anyone think of that before?

Over the past two weeks, we’ve had the Washington Post editorial board interview, with its revelation of the vacuum that is Trump’s knowledge of policy; and the long NYT interview with Trump’s loose talks about bringing nukes to Korea and Japan; and his fateful interview with Chris Matthews, who to his credit was the first person really to push Trump for an answer on abortion; and the similar gaping-emptiness of Trump’s knowledge revealed in his Washington Post interview today.

What’s different now is Trump is being forced to talk about actual policy choices, like abortion, as opposed to talking about his own machismo, or striking purely symbolic “we’re gonna win again!” poses. And that he’s actually being forced, most impressively by Chris Matthews. You can never count him out, but the damage is beginning to show.

He is a more resourceful performer than Sarah Palin was, and he has changed politics more than she could. But she is actually better informed than he is, and finally that is catching up with him. That’s what we’re seeing now.

Barring the unforeseen, one of the five people now running will become Commander in Chief next year, and most likely one of these two: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. With that in mind, and before I need to go offline for several days on a different project, here is one more installment from readers on the candidates and the choice.

1) Trump at the WaPo. I mentioned yesterday that if the idea of “being qualified” still applied to presidential candidates, the hour Trump spent with the Washington Post’s editorial board would have instantly and conclusively disqualified him. He displayed real understanding of no topics, and gross mis-understanding of many. He shunted all answers back to the two themes he can discuss: how he is a winner relative to losers like low-energy Jeb and Little Marco; and how big his hands are. If you think I’m exaggerating, read it for yourself. Trump used to be amusing, in a pro-wrestling way. Now he is manifestly not-normal, in an ominous way.

Why bring this up? A reader who works in the defense industry emphasizes one particular mismatch of Trump’s views and the realities of foreign policy:

At the Post, Trump said, amongst other things:

“I think John Kerry’s deal with Iran is one of the worst things that I’ve ever seen negotiated of any kind. It’s just a horrible giveaway...Well, I think, number one, we shouldn’t have given the money back. I think, number two, we should have had our prisoners before the negotiations started. We should have doubled up the sanctions.…. And I think it’s going to just lead, actually, to nuclear problems. I also think it’s going to be bad for Israel. It’s a very bad deal for Israel.”

Where to start?

First of all, we didn't "give" any money to Iran. Other countries had been holding Iran's money, at our request, while negotiations were on going.

Secondly, what evidence is there that the other P5+1 members would go along with doubling sanctions? It was hard enough to get China and Russia on board with sanctions to begin with. And what evidence is there that Iran would capitulate in the face of increased sanctions?

The goal of the negotiations was the minimize the threat of a nuclear Iran. Increased sanctions did not reduce that threat without direct negotiations. Iran had 164 centrifuges in 2003. By the time President Obama took office, that number went up to 8,000. Four years later, the number was 22,000. And all of this happened in the face of brutal sanctions. For Trump to blithely say doubling sanctions would secure the release of those hostages flies in the face of fact because sanctions failed to do what they were implemented to do to begin with….

So, yes, positions and reasoning like this, in a sane political climate, would disqualify Trump as a candidate. But we're not in a sane political climate, and I believe something that your friend Mike Lofgren has referred to as "anti-knowledge" has taken root within the GOP. Thus, ignorance of facts is worn as a badge of honor.

God help us if Trump's elected.

***

2) What about mental health? A reader on the East Coast writes:

Question for the psychotherapists out there: Aren’t there enough statements and actions by Trump that are now part of the public record to enable a professional to render some sort of diagnosis? Does one really have to have the guy on the couch in an office to get a better sense of him?

I believe that most of Trump’s behavior in this campaign is not strategic or a deliberate effort to win the Presidency. His constant attacks on Meghan Kelly, which Fox News as labels a “sick obsession”, his predictable personal attack on anyone who criticizes or disagrees with him (almost all of which are gratuitous and, if anything, hurt his chances), his pattern of constantly referring to his wealth, his success as a business man, his intelligence, his constant lying (which seems to be something of a compulsion), his constant referring to his polling numbers and the size of his audiences (much of which is grossly exaggerated), his refusal to acknowledge, contrary to all evidence and the public record, his numerous business failures—all of this suggest a man not in control of his behavior. It also suggests a man who is almost entirely un-self-aware.

There’s just so much material to work from here. One would think that a competent professional could make a reasonable armchair diagnosis of Trump.

I’ve changed my mind about this. Earlier I posted some messages from readers asking whether Trump had some identifiable personality disorder. Now I think there’s no point in even wondering about arm’s length medical diagnoses: what matters is what he says and does.

If the Trump who is making these boasts and sending out these Tweets were, underneath it all, the mentally healthiest and most balanced person in America, that wouldn’t make any difference. The statements he has placed on the public record are in themselves grounds for concern. No one whose public statements are this thin-skinned, impulsive, defensive, and seemingly uncontrolled has any business being in command of the world’s most powerful military force.

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3) “The AIPAC speech represented what I don’t like about Hillary Clinton.” Through the Obama era, AIPAC has essentially become an operating arm of Likud’s interests in Israel and the Republican Party’s in the United States. Peter Beinart makes that case in Haaretz; it was starkly evident during last year’s bitter debate on the Iran-nuclear deal, which AIPAC did its best (and worst) to kill.

The Republican speeches at AIPAC this week were predictably pro-Netanyhau and anti-Obama, Trump’s childishly so. (For which the new president of AIPAC apologized, the day after Trump had appeared and received a standing ovation.) Bernie Sanders composed what I considered an excellent speech for AIPAC about the route to sustainable peace in the Middle East; unfortunately he wasn’t able to deliver it in person. Since (according to Sanders) AIPAC declined to let him speak by video, as some previous Republican candidates have done, he merely issued the written text. Nonetheless the speech deserves notice: It was in the spirit of what Kevin Rudd, then prime minister of Australia, called his “true friend” (zhengyou) address to the Chinese government in 2008, in which he said that genuine, respectful friendship required pointing out uncomfortable areas of disagreement as well as the comforting platitudes.

With the exception of defending the Iran deal, Hillary Clinton pretty much stuck to the comforting themes before AIPAC. That is where a reader in Minnesota picks up, and explains why, as a Democrat, he is having a hard time with her:

I just read your post which began with the Safire quote describing Ms. Clinton as a congenital liar. [This was William Safire of the NYT, using that term for then-First Lady Hillary Clinton twenty years ago.]

I speak to many of my friends, family, and colleagues about today’s political mess, and most have never described Ms. Clinton as a congenital liar. However, most of my circle of acquaintances (including some staunch Clinton supporters) have admitted / concluded that Ms. Clinton will say and do whatever it takes to become President, regardless of the effect on everyday working Americans or her comments’ relationship to any objective truth.

Those who support her while admitting the above claim that she simply deserves the office——but have never been able to provide a cogent argument as to why she, and she alone, deserves to be President. Those who do not support her are quite worried that she will actually expand upon the NeoCon expansionism, warmongering, and international intervention behavior of the Bush Administration. I have come to believe this is correct, and very troubling.

Ms. Clinton’s speech to AIPAC left little doubt that she intends to demonstrate that she is far less cautious and far more interested in expanding our global influence and international interventions than the arguably over-cautious President Obama.

You and I have traveled extensively over the years. I just returned from Indonesia, where the American election is gaining a lot of attention, and not in a very positive way.

As I continue to watch and study the behavior of all the candidates, it seems that Ms. Clinton would become the most internationally aggressive of all (with the possible exception of the certifiably sociopathic Ted Cruz). If the Brussels attacks are significant in any way, it seems that they signal (among many other things) that continued expansion and pro-Israel blind support cannot possibly bring us any closer to peace and security——and are more likely to bring the opposite result.

I fear a Clinton Presidency for these and many other reasons——and I don’t believe I am the only thoughtful person who would have to think long and hard about what I will do if we end up with a Clinton vs. Trump election.

Writing in Bernie Sanders name may be dysfunctional and perhaps even wrong------but I cannot imagine any other choice that would allow my conscience to remain at peace.

I have come to expect that almost every politician tells the occasional (if not the regular) lie——except for your former boss and my favorite President of my lifetime. [JF note: This would be Jimmy Carter.] Lying is not something that I fear nearly as much as the pursuit of international expansionism, warmongering, propping up tyrants, and our ongoing meddling in far too many foreign nations’ internal affairs.

***

4) “Nothing has given me such hope in years.” Another reader from the Midwest, who I believe also thinks of herself as a Democrat, is similarly dissatisfied but sees reasons for hope in the Trump campaign:

Academics and their groupie pundits have talked about the ‘hollowing out’ of the middle/working classes for years, but politicians have been helpless to do anything except change the subject.

One thing for sure, neither the Republicans nor Democrats are able to reform themselves. Only something like a meteor hitting them from the outside (a/k/a Trump) can start a re-alignment. The Sanders campaign has its own role, playing the dead canary warning Democrats of toxic times ahead.

And they deserve it. Ever since President Reagan broke PATCO as the first, most destructive wave of steel and auto plant closings surged, Republicans have been recklessly caught up in unsolvable wedge issues and Democrats mired in narrow single-issue ‘movement’ politics, each feeding on each other. Meanwhile, the economy lost its productive muscle and began its decades-long tilt (descent) towards finance and oligarchy.

Maybe it takes a demogogue to shake things up. It would be wrong to think all these Trump supporters are racist deadbeats, as too many liberals are quick to judge. One Trump supporter on TV explained, “the Blacks have their programs, the immigrants have theirs, why not some help for us.” Representing laid off 50 year olds now working part-time, underpaid jobs this sentiment looks more like common sense than racism to me.

And who knows? Maybe the clash in Chicago [at the cancelled Trump rally] will lead to that long-sought-after-serious ‘talk about race’ that politicians talk about but never describe. You can’t get closer than thousands of white middle/working class Trump supporters standing in line for an arena rally facing a polygot collection of mostly middle/working class minority and immigrant students worried about their own futures. Close body contact of a volatile and dangerous type.

Which way all this will go is unclear. No one's going to beat Trump calling him racist and xenophobic. Only someone equally as bold and icon-shattering as Trump can compete. Few policy wonks qualify.

There’s no turning back now, however, not to the Hillarys and Jebs, the Pelosi’s and McConnels. Nothing in the public sphere has given me such hope for years.

***

5) “I feel no passion for the Democratic field.” In a less hopeful vein, a Democrat in Texas weighs in:

I volunteered for Obama in 2007-08 and voted for him twice, and think he has been a great success under difficult circumstances. Not perfect, but still very good and even historic in many ways that you’ve written about. I’m in my late 40s and he is without a doubt the only president who has ever aroused strong emotions and with whom I feel a genuine connection.

I feel nothing like that for either of the Dem candidates this time. Many of my friends are passionate Bernie supporters. I just don’t get it and have found myself resisting arguments with my friends. To me, he is Ralph Nader with a ‘D’ next to his name. As one of your other readers stated, I fear he would be a very ineffective president who would damage liberalism for a long time. I question his temperament and particularly his ability to withstand adversity (these are particular areas of strength for Obama). Bernie becomes irate, defensive, even whiny, when subjected to tough questions by reporters, and his incessant complaining about media coverage is just annoying. What will he do as President when the Tea Party Congress craps all over his proposals, or when Putin or Bibi attempts to humiliate him publicly?...

I wish Elizabeth Warren were running because our choices are uninspiring. I have very mixed feelings about Hillary even though I voted for her in the primary. Bottom line for me is that despite her flaws, I think she will be a reasonably effective president. I worry about her coziness with Wall Street and her judgment in moments of crisis, domestic and international.

I did not like her recent hawkish speech to AIPAC and worry that she will squander the good will Obama has managed to build in the Islamic world. She seems to struggling a little to adapt her sometimes dated political rhetoric to the current landscape (example: her unfortunate comments about the Reagans and AIDS, her awkward attempts to address mass incarceration and the Black Lives Matter movement).

I would like to see our home grown Dems here in San Antonio, Julian and Joaquin Castro, move into more prominent roles in the future as I think they have great potential. But I’m not sure a VP slot makes sense this cycle. I can see a lot of older white voters hesitant to vote for ticket that includes a woman and a Latino.

I’m also very curious to see what Obama’s post-presidential career looks like. He’s still pretty young and I can’t imagine him idle for long, nor can I imagine him following Clinton’s path of creating a foundation. I think he has much more to contribute.

***

6) The nightmare of strong women. A male reader sends this list:

Hillary Clinton is far from the first strong woman in public life to be slandered relentlessly by her political opponents and those offended by feminine leadership. Let us take a brief tour.

Wu Zetian (624 - 705) was the only female emperor of China. Despite being a strong ruler who governed well, her reputation as a scheming, ruthless woman willing to do anything to gain and keep power overwhelmed her accomplishments.

Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122 - 1204) was Queen of France, then Queen of England, and the mother of three kings of England. She was highly educated, and played an important role in the political and military struggles during the latter part of Henry II’s reign as King of England. In the popular imagination, however, her reputation was formed by fanciful stories of her leading a group of decadent nobles in scandalous sexual practices, and a vicious rumor that she had murdered one of Henry’s mistresses.

Isabeau of Bavaria (1370 - 1435) became Queen of France at the age of fifteen when she married Charles VI. Caught up in vicious power struggles when Charles’s mental illness left him unable to rule, Queen Isabeau was accused of about every crime possible, including adultery and witchcraft. This reputation lasted until 20th-century historians reviewed the evidence and discovered that she was intelligent, well-educated, pious, devoted to her children, and an effective ruler in her husband’s place.

Catherine de Medici (1519 - 1589) was Queen of France from 1547 to 1559 and played a leading role in the Byzantine power struggles among the French nobility during the Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants. Though clearly no better or worse than the Bourbons and Guises and other rivals for power, Catherine—as not only a woman but a foreigner, being the daughter of Lorenzo de Medici of Florence—got most of the blame for a host of poisonings, assassinations, and political back-stabbings.

Catherine the Great (1729-96) ruled Russia for more than thirty years. Compared with other Russian emperors, she was clearly above average as a reformer and a supporter of Enlightenment ideals. Like her male counterparts, she took lovers, but the stories told about her falsely accused her not just of licentiousness, but of perversion. These slanders culminated in the rumor that she died from a stroke suffered while attempting to have sexual intercourse with a stallion.

Empress Dowager Cixi of China (1835 -1908) was a remarkable woman who began her imperial career as a lowly concubine but ended up as the mother of the heir to the throne and, as Regent, the nominal ruler of China for decades. Surrounded by powerful factions in a dying empire, Cixi successfully navigated among them but was slandered as vicious, sexually perverse, manipulative, extravagant, power-hungry, and so on.

So is Hillary the devious, lying, scheming, ambitious, ruthless harridan that the Republicans say she is? Sure. And do you know the story of the servant girl that Cixi murdered by throwing her down a well?

The personal-insult war underway last night between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz brings the campaign down to a level hard to imagine even in the days of “Little Marco” and “small hands.” If the concept of being “qualified” for the presidency still had any salience, Trump’s astonishing meeting with the WashingtonPost editorial board this week (transcript here) would have instantly and conclusively removed him from the race. It was not his inability and/or refusal to engage any point of substance that was so remarkable—and so much worse than with, say, Sarah Palin or Rick Perry. Rather it was his seventh-grade-locker-room obsession with “size” issues, as Conor Friedersdorf very convincingly demonstrates.

How did we get here? One of the most useful explanations I’ve seen is from E.J. Dionne in his new book Why the Right Went Wrong. I’d urge you to read it yourself — but if you’d like an overview, here is a discussion I did with him last month, at the Kentucky Author Forum in Louisville. A video version has just gone up on the Kentucky Educational Television site, with a good description of E.J.’s argument by Patrick Reed.

Dionne starts this book by saying, “The history of contemporary American conservatism is a story of disappointment and betrayal,” and he goes on to connect that 50-year pattern (since the Barry Goldwater days) to the fury of today’s GOP. Wave after wave of conservative leaders, Dionne says, have promised their base that they finally can produce sweeping rightwing changes to undo the Democrats’ handiwork. Wave after wave of conservative leaders is unable to do so. Mitch McConnell and John Boehner can’t undo Obamacare; John Roberts turns into Earl Warren (from the right’s point of view); and a one-time Tea Party darling like Marco Rubio sells out on an immigration deal. Everyone’s a RINO! So it’s time to double down. This road leads to Cruz and Trump.

Again, for the full version consult this very illuminating book. Also consider the video below. [CB note: Watch here if the video doesn’t appear.] Thanks to our friends in Kentucky for putting on this forum.

Until recently, the most famous Scottish-American could well have been Scrooge McDuck. Now there’s a new title holder. The millions of Americans who share this heritage, including me, reflect somberly upon the shift to the Trump brand. Here is Mr. Trump back in the motherland a few years ago, at some golf course ceremony. (David Moir / Reuters)

A reader who is a mental-health professional in Australia responds to speculation in some previous posts (notably here) that Donald Trump’s public persona meets many of the criteria of actual mental disorders: (Emphasis added in his note.)

I am responding to the comment made by a clinical psychology doctoral student… I think that your reader made a very compelling case in their first paragraph as to why we can’t “safely say that Donald Trump has a narcissistic personality disorder”; namely that this requires extensive quantitative and qualitative assessment over a period of time with the individual’s personal engagement. Also, it's hard enough for those with NPD to seek help, without thinking they're going to be compared to this whole mess!

However, they missed one incredibly important reason why he probably doesn’t have a personality disorder: Trump’s narcissism is part of the product he’s selling.

Trump is one of the world’s most successful salespeople of a personal brand, a reality TV star and an American politician. Self assured attention seeking is the key to success in all these arenas. Trump’s had a long history of seeing how much people like him when he shows no doubt.

I think people are struggling to determine how much of what Trump does is a performance. But, the difference between performance and self-perception is vital. The lack of empathy is a performance of his non-PC persona. His disinterest in listening to experts is part of his ‘Übermensch of the people’ act. His desire to be seen as exceptional and to be admired by others is ultimately no different from that of any other presidential campaign pitch.

I would argue, however, that Trump’s inner world, how he really perceives himself and relates to others remains very much a mystery. That aspect, the self-perception, is crucial to diagnosing personality disorders. You would know better than I, but I imagine there is much about a politician’s inner world that we don’t see from the public performance.

Trump should not be subjected to armchair diagnoses. Not just because it’s a cheap shot, not just because it’s a profound misunderstanding of clinical psychology and an injustice to those who do suffer from personality disorders, but because the claim that Trump is mentally ill is too easy and too comforting.

The ‘disordered’ Trump character is the twisted reflection the ‘hopelessly aloof’ Obama caricature that some hold in their head. We struggle to empathise with those who seem to be pitching their message to someone else. It’s part of the same inability to even attempt to understand the other that drives political animosity in your country and mine (look up Clive Palmer if you want the low-rent Australia version of Trump). Writing people off as mentally ill absolves us from needing to engage with a point of view that needs to be engaged with, regardless of how toxic it is.

Trump is Trump. You can’t diagnose him; the disease is in the political system. In the partisan politics of the current era there’s never been a happier warrior, because he’s completely at home there.

Good luck with that one.

***

And who is this Clive Palmer, referred to above? He’s the person you see pictured below, with a follow-up explanation from the Australian reader about why the comparison with Trump is illuminating.

Clive Palmer, announcing a plan to build a replica of the Titantic (Olivia Harris / Reuters)

From the Australian mental-health practitioner:

The more I see of what's happening in America right now, the more convinced I am that we really dodged a bullet over here with Australia's very own Trump, Clive Frederick Palmer.

Up to a point, the stories seem remarkably similar. Take one eccentric/absurd business man (greatest hits: announcing that he was building his own replica of the Titanic, getting his football team kicked out of the country's premier league for bad business practices, opening a dinosaur park where the dinosaur burnt down) with delusions of grandeur.

Add in a bid for leadership of the country, funded by his personal wealth, with a populist campaign that promises the moon. Stir through a climate of animosity towards 'politics as usual' that's tainted both major parties Finish up with a scattershot of policies drawn from the left and right side of politics, with no unifying philosophy beyond "things will be better!" and "let's make more money!".

What saved us is the parliamentary system. Palmer had been chased out of party politics years ago, and there is no way in our political system that anyone can ride a populist wave all the way to the top because the party hacks can trip you up a hundred times along the way. Palmer had to start his own party and scurry to find legitimate candidates for both houses of parliament in time for the election….

Minor parties here need to build themselves over successive elections by demonstrating that they're actually legitimate about their values and about being a serious part of the political system. How's the Palmer United Party doing in it's first term? Well two of the three Senators have left the party citing cronyism and abuse. Palmer was taken to court by Chinese investors for misusing their funds. His old nickel refinery has gone into voluntary administration and sacked its workforce, after having donated heavily to his campaign. His bizarre behavior in office and the ever-present whiff of corruption have pretty much ended any hope of re-election. And the Titanic II still hasn't been built.

The American system has a lot of advantages, but I'm not sure how well it holds up to snake-oil salesmen at times like this.

***

To round out today’s internationally themed dispatches, a reader in Canada says that the Trump era has already arrived there:

We in Toronto have already elected Donald Trump, in the person of Rob Ford, a populist, wealthy son of a demanding father who made a political point of not owing anyone anything.

If our experience offers any guide, the election of Donald Trump would lead to disaster for the United States, and a worse disaster for Donald Trump. By the end of his first term, even his worst enemies would pity him. The United States might well simply lose four years, in the sense that Rob Ford's term as mayor stopped some important initiatives cold and brought no new ones to the table.

Rob Ford enjoying a moment of levity during a Toronto city council meeting in 2013. (Mark Blinch / Reuters)

Of course, losing direction in a city government, even an alpha world city, has many fewer potential consequences than dysfunctional or even malignant government in the planet's leading economic and military power. Unlike Donald Trump. Rob Ford had and has expertise in responsive government; he got elected partly on his well earned reputation as the quickest councillor to return phone calls. Unfortunately, even a major city mayor cannot handle the whole business of a city by returning phone calls, and most analysis I have seen suggests that Rob Ford quickly found himself well out of his depth as mayor. The mismatch between Donald Trump and the skill set required of an American president appears much greater.

The late NYT columnist William Safire, in 1996. After he wrote a column saying that then-First Lady Hillary Clinton was a “congenital liar,” then-President Bill Clinton said that he would like to punch Safire in the nose. Hilarity ensued when Safire was given a set of boxing gloves when he appeared on Meet the Press. (Ho New / Reuters)

Again with minimal set-up, let’s go straight to reader views on why so many people can sound so angry about Hillary Clinton. In the previous installment, we heard from readers who said that the anti-HRC reaction boiled down mainly to sexism. Today, assenting and dissenting views.

Let’s remember the history. A reader scolds me for amnesia:

HRC as "congenital liar" is actually a quote from William Saffire. Surely you knew that: [From January 1996]

“Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady -- a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation -- is a congenital liar.”

Ah, yes, it comes back to me now. On the other hand, to chafe the reader, I also remember that the influential-at-the-time Republican columnist for the NYT was actually William Safire.

She’s too much of a moderate. From a female reader on the West Coast:

I have been supporting Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Party’s nomination, but only in part because I share his Social Democratic policy proposals. Just as important to me are what I see as some ways in which Secretary Clinton in the past has acted or voted that are evidence of the weaknesses that political moderates can get lost in.

The two prime examples for me are her talk about “super predators" in supporting the changes that led to mass incarceration, and her vote for the Iraq war. In both cases I think she did these partly as a way of influencing Reagan Democrats to come back to the Democratic Party fold. The “super predator” meme is a concession to implicit bias and the vote for the Iraq war to me represented giving in to the fear of being labeled soft on defense.

I am not opposed at all to speaking to the concerns of those Democrats who voted for Reagan; I knew some of them in my days as a machinist.

What bothers me is conceding to wrong ideas or people’s misunderstandings. Those folks were my friends, and where I thought it necessary I engaged them by disputing the inaccurate negative stereotypes such as super predator or welfare queen. She needs to have the courage to openly address these beliefs even as she does so in a way that does not dismiss people. I think she is capable of walking this line, but it requires being self-aware enough to realize not only that she made a mistake, but all the reasons why they were problematic.… The bully pulpit is a place form which such implicit biases can be changed, but it requires conscious intent. That is one thing I want to see her exhibit in this campaign; that she gets why especially mouthing the “super predator” myth was so destructive.

I am not opposed to political moderation, but like all political leanings it has its benefits and its dangers. To the extent that she acts reflexively to court votes in a way that reinforces implicit bias or makes policy choices to prove she is tough, I think she needs push-back. I will support her if she is the Democratic Party nominee, but I will also continue to speak out if I think she is catering to wrong ideas or bad policy.

***

It’s not just the conservatives:

Another male Dem piling on with another theory/observation regarding Hillary hatred and Trumpism….

Just wanted to let you know (if others haven’t yet) that the Hillary hate is not limited to angry white male “conservatives”, at least not in my Facebook feed. As a lifelong, opinionated lefty Democrat, my Facebook feed is full of similarly inclined friends, most of whom passionately support Bernie Sanders.

Unfortunately your typical angry, misogynist, middle-aged uncle has nothing on many of my Facebook friends when it comes to passing around (mostly) baseless lies and character assassination aimed at Hillary Clinton. Email server and Benghazi memes, mostly culled from right-wing sources are passed around with wild abandon. Breathless Clinton conspiracy theories-- again sourced from the right-- are posted up and shared without a moment taken to ask where they are coming from.

The “Hillary super-delegates are going to steal the election from Bernie” meme is a case in point…. The persistence of the rumor among my Bernie supporter friends against all evidence (for example a quick look at how HRC superdelegates responded to Obama taking the lead back in 2008) would be familiar to anyone on the receiving end of angry Uncle Bob’s Benghazi emails.

In my admittedly anecdotal Facebook experience the Hillary hate coming from progressives isn’t limited to "Bernie Bros”. Some of the worst I’ve seen comes from my female friends, women of all ages (with impeccable feminist credentials I might add). I have two female friends who actually insist they can’t vote for Clinton because her “voice is annoying and she shouts”.

My point is that thirty years of right wing Hillary hate, aided by the Fox News echo chamber and abetted by a “mainstream” media that prefers to discuss the political effectiveness of the attacks rather than the veracity of the claims has been deeply internalized by the left, to the point that even a significant number of feminists can’t vote for a women who “shouts”. Game, set, and match to the consistency and persistence of Republican message discipline.

Of course not all of my circle has bought into Republican nihilism, but that many of my “progressive” friends cite anti-Clinton right wing memes to justify sitting out the election, even at the risk of a Trump presidency or a Supreme Court packed with Ted Cruz appointees is galling. It’s as if the 2000 election, along with the resulting wars of choice and disastrous Supreme Court picks are forgotten. They would prefer “blowing up the system” by electing Donald Trump, the better to rebuild from the ashes rather than see another Clinton president. In that they seem to share more with angry Uncle Bob than anyone should care to admit.

***

Let’s not forget morality. Finally for the day, and returning us to Trump:

One unobserved point about Trump is how far systematic morality has been taken out of the public sphere, and it seems to me out of private calculations as well.

Trump himself exhibits the moral sense of a three year old, minus any apparent empathy for any other human being. Traditional GOP cant has relied on a Trad Vals script which, for all its hypocrisy on the one hand and its truncated Christianity on the other (one of Kasich's problems is that, as a conservative Anglican, he acknowledges a responsibility to the poor), it at least implies the relevance of moral argument. The Dem/liberal side is explicitly grounded in moral imperative.

So here comes Trump, and both his behavior now and his history shows that he suffers under no moral compass whatsoever. "Good" means getting what he wants, and "bad" means anything that gets in the way, and I don't think he lies so much as he simply pays no attention to the truth at all, the poster turkey for "Looking Out for #1" (it's telling that he and Ringer were both in commercial real estate).

People have erected this idol of Hillary Clinton as this liar, which I think partly stems from sheer slander, partly from her not all that appealing manner, but in large part because she's the only one other than Trump who has enough of a history of actually trying to run anything to allow people to pick over her mistakes. I'd rather not have her for her policies, but the hatred of her from the right is more visceral than grounded, out of proportion to her failings.

But this seems to not matter at all about Trump. And I strongly suspect, from the sorts of things I'm reading from or hearing about his supporters, that they to some great degree share his amorality. That's not to say that they lack any moral sense, but that it is no larger than they are, which is to say, they do not seem to be capable of being swayed by any sort of moral argument, accepting no moral authority outside themselves.

This is a huge problem in many ways, but in politics it makes it impossible to work to any greater good, and it makes it plausible to vote for a man who cannot run his own businesses, never mind our government. The consequences of such a vote simply do not matter, and the fact that he lies as he breathes does not matter.

Twenty years ago: first lady Hillary Clinton with her book It Takes a Village. (Jeff Mitchell / Reuters)

I am on the road without time to do any set-up (or, sigh, to finish several pending posts on aspects of modern America that are more encouraging than the presidential race). So, unadorned, further reader thoughts on the rise of Trump and “she’s just as bad!” bitterness against Hillary Clinton:

The culmination of a long pattern. A reader in the northeast argues that in this as in many other matters, the GOP’s tone in 2016 is the logical result of trends underway for many decades:

A number of readers have already commented on the “Hillary hatred” phenomenon, but I think a few further points can be added on this topic:

First, it is not only the Trump supporters who invoke a caricature of Hillary as a “congenital liar” and/or “tool of Wall Street.” This is very widespread among Republicans generally. It is perhaps most commonly used, as seen with the “vote for Bozo” reader, to justify continuing to vote Republican virtually regardless of the candidate.

Second, the “congenital liar” label has been applied to Hillary for years. Trump’s emergence as the GOP frontrunner now puts Republicans like “vote for Bozo” in an especially awkward position. The rationale that they can’t vote for Hillary because of her dishonesty is blown to pieces by Trump’s epic dishonesty. To quote Republican columnist David Brooks, Trump is “perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes. All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy.” If you can’t vote for Hillary because of her dishonesty, then you can’t possibly vote for Trump.

Third, Hillary Clinton is hardly the only Democrat to whom this line of thinking is applied by Republicans. Indeed, virtually every nationally successful or effective figure in the DP in the past 25 years has been described by the GOP and GOP-friendly media as having character flaws that fundamentally disqualify them from holding office.

Obama was harshly attacked in this way starting in 2008, once it became apparent that he could win the election, and this has steadily escalated to the point where the GOP establishment now paints him as an essentially illegitimate president—refusing to consider his nominees or take up his budget proposal. Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, John Kerry, and Tom Daschle have all faced smears and concerted vilification. Liberals often seem surprised by this.

How can anyone describe Obama, a moderate, center-left Democrat, in such extreme terms? This misses the point that these leaders are vilified and dismissed as illegitimate precisely because they are moderate. Portraying them as extreme won’t stick, and thus a different strategy is needed to raise their negatives.

This is Newt Gingrich’s gift to America. If Sanders is the Democratic candidate (which looks unlikely at this point), my prediction is that he will be spared the character/ personal barrage directed at Hillary and others. It won’t be needed, because he can be effectively attacked as a Socialist.

This experience has always stuck with me, though it may be colored/distorted by the tricks of memory.

The Albany, NY, press corps annually conducts a Legislative Correspondents Association show in which the press corps pillories the governor and legislatures. It’s like the White House Correspondents dinner in ways good (these clever people can be really funny, and it was a target rich environment) and bad (you can count the ways).

In either 1992 or 1993 (it was after Hillary Clinton’s “Stand By Your Man” 1992 comments on 60 Minutes), [a female] Associated Press reporter came out as Hillary Clinton. She wore a black leather bomber jacket (playing off some sort of stereotype) to perform a parody version of “Stand By Your Man.”

I don’t remember the lyrics, but I do remember the audience reaction when it was apparent that it was “Hillary” up there. It was very frightening:

The audience was largely male (lobbyists and the legislators they bought the expensive “charity” tickets for) and the reaction reminded me of being in a fraternity house when a porn movie started (sorry to say that I have experienced that kind of thing in the late ‘70s). The best way I can describe it was that there was a palpable “whoosh” of mysogyny. Hooting and catcalls, all directed at “Hillary.”

Hillary had obviously been on the scene a little while, but she was hardly well known. I remembered wondering what she could have done to earn this visceral, aggressive contempt. It continues now, and I’m not sure there is anything complicated about it.

What do some white men fear more than a black president? From another reader, who like the previous two is male:

When I was growing up in Eastern North Carolina there was always a certain level of Clinton hatred among whites. But definitely Hillary got more of it than Bill. All Jesse Helms had to do was mention the name “Hillary” to get white North Carolinians riled up at “uppity feminist elitist” liberalism.

Something that was very clarifying to me was when a female friend posed this question: Do male politicians who have shifted positions get the same level of hatred for it as Hillary? The answer is obviously no. Another clarifying thing was when I examined how Hillary’s favorable ratings fell as soon as she started running for President. Look at polls and it’s incredible to note her approval as Secretary of State and how that dropped, not from Benghazi, but as soon as she started running for President.

If we ignore the role that sexism plays in Hillary hatred then we are ignoring the truth that’s in front of our nose. Note that I’m not saying that it’s sexist to criticize Hillary. I’m not saying that she shouldn’t be held accountable for her record. But we males especially need to take an honest look at how our fear of a female President shapes our reactions to Hillary. If you’re a white male, do you react as strongly against Clinton’s positions when they are held by a male politician? Biden has a similar centrist track record. Would he attract the same level of disdain for it as Hillary if he were running for President?

There are countless policy areas with which to disagree with Hillary Clinton. But it’s no accident that email servers and Benghazi seem to provoke more anger than Iraq and the Patriot Act. White males have always feared a black president. We fear a female one even more.

She doesn’t check the “good woman” boxes. From another male reader who grew up in the South:

I grew up in Arkansas during Bill Clinton’s political career there. Much of the Hillary hatred I hear from conservatives today is no different from what I heard then, when she came in for particularly spiteful criticism above and beyond her husband.

Boiled down, she’s a woman who checks none of their “Good Woman” boxes. There are many, many things that have been layered on top of that over the decades of her public career, but that one still lies at the base and is the main source of the particularly vitriolic hatred, I think. Absent that, they would just hate her the same way they hate Harry Reid or Jimmy Carter.

I'll add that, like your defense contractor engineer, I have a hard time seeing myself voting in this year’s election. My own objection to Hillary comes from my civil liberties and open government views. Her notion of her privacy while holding public office could hardly be more at odds with what I consider the duties of any public official. (President Obama was a massive disappointment on this score, as well.) Her foreign policy views are also much too conservative for me.

My voting forecast wouldn’t change if Bernie Sanders happened to win the nomination, by the way. Not for any specific policy position or another, but because I simply think he'd be a terribly ineffective president who'd damage the liberal brand for a generation.

If I lived in a swing state, I’d probably hold my nose and go to the polls for either of them. But my state is going GOP by a wide, wide margin.

***

What about Benghazi? Huh???? To balance things out, and as a sample of the anti-HRC mail that comes in, I offer this, from a reader who (unlike the previous three) doesn’t use his real name.

I was at a loss as to your article entitled "Why so much Hillary Hate?" did not address: 1. Her speaking fees from Wall Street banks resulting in a conflict of interest; 2. Her use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State, for which there is a active FBI investigation concerning violations of national secrecy laws; 3. The appearance of the conflicts of interest between her actions as Secretary of State and donations made to the Clinton Foundation by UBS, Dow Chemical and the Russian Uranium deal.

When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he replied "Because that’s where the money is". When Hillary Clinton was asked why she paid $675,000 for three speeches to Goldman Sachs, her response was "Because that is what they offered". To me it sounds like she was channeling Willie Sutton, a kindred spirit.

Hillary Clinton in Florida after her victory there this week. (Carlos Barria / Reuters)

In contrast to Donald Trump’s theme, I’ve been saying all along that America Is Already Great Again™. But his campaign is certainly making the country even greater in one specific way, which is the volume of interesting and impassioned correspondence that is coming in about the man, the era, and the implications.

I’ll keep doling these out in regular increments, combining them thematically where possible. Today’s assortment starts with a question about his most likely general-election opponent:

OK, Trump’s an outlier, but why is Hillary Clinton considered equally beyond the pale? From a reader in California who was in grade school when Hillary Clinton became First Lady:

I have noticed that the Trump supporters you quote on your blog have a common disdain for Clinton. It's almost like their support for the TV actor is linked to her at least in part.

In fact, every person I have personally spoken to who supports Sanders or one of the Republicans mentions her almost immediately when asked why they prefer their candidate of choice.

Nearly all my life (I was 10 years old in 1992) I have heard of the horrors and evils of this woman. Yet, since I was a child and now into my mid-30s I haven't understood exactly why she is so hated. Do you have insight? What about this woman is so distasteful beyond basic partisanship? She seems like the only “serious” candidate to me and if she truly is that awful I would really like to know why!

From a reader on the East Coast who actually remembers the Clinton era:

In reference to one of your letter writers you posted earlier today: Is Hillary a congenital liar and in the pocket of Wall Street? These ideas are debatable. She certainly is widely disliked, or has “high negatives,” as they say.

I’d be interested in your views on this topic. I, for one, am not convinced she is a liar, congenital or otherwise. (Does your letter write who called her that disbelieve her denials about Vince Foster’s death?) She has been under attack for a quarter century and could arguably be seen as having the defensive posture of the perennially persecuted.

What do I believe about Hillary? Responding to all the various criticisms would take too much time, and I don’t need to do that anyway. But, I do believe she genuinely wants to make the world work better for people, and I believe she would work toward that goal as President. What led me to that conclusion? I read this article and learned about her improving the college library’s book return policy. Seemingly trivial? But, she thought it mattered. I think helping people is “in her DNA.” (I assume the story is true as is the story in the same article on her speech at her commencement.)

And, I admit to having concerns about her judgement. I get the long-term goal (helping people) but am often befuddled by her short-term strategy.

Similarly from Vasav Swaminathan, a University of Michigan graduate and Air Force veteran who is now in graduate school at Georgia Tech. Like the first reader, he was very young during the previous Clinton era:

I’m surprised by the number of your readers who consider voting for Hilary as unpalatable as voting for Trump.

To me, she’s a politician, who has made tough calls and done unsavory things that come from a lifetime in government. But she’s no worse than almost anyone else who’s been in the government for 20 years or more, with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders since he was, until now, very much a niche candidate in a unique state.

When people talk about Benghazi but don't seem to see Iraq in the same light, I get confused. The biggest difference between the two situations is 2,495 American souls. And what other scandals does she have on her record? Whitewater amounted to very little. Her husband cheated on her. So … what?

For the record, I'’l be voting democratic in the general election.

Because life is short, I’m not even going to try to get into the question: why so many intense feelings about Hillary Clinton? (And I don’t plan to run any further back-and-forth about the meaning of the 1990s, or Whitewater, or Vince Foster, or Ken Starr, or — God save us — Benghazi.) Hearing the question is like being asked, by a non-American: Why is the GOP so upset about Obama? Where do we start? I’m just offering these notes as samples of a view contrary to some I’ve already quoted.

***

In the same email, Swaminathan went on to make a point several others have mentioned. It’s based on a previous pro-Trump note from a man who identified himself as “A Machinist,” and then criticism of the machinist’s views from a electronic engineer in the defense industry.

Unrelatedly, I also found the EE [engineer] who commented to be full of himself.

First of all, skilled machinists are pretty dang important to the modern economy, even in the world of numerically controlled machines. Those guys can read machine language as well as you read Mandarin. The difference between him and the machinist isn't necessarily brainpower—among other things, including choices they've made during their younger years, it’s opportunity.

I also recently completed my masters in engineering, and I agree it wasn’t an easy thing to do. But more than being fortunate to have brainpower, I think I was fortunate to have had a strong support structure from my family (and the GI Bill) to help me complete that degree. A lot of the troops I had the privilege to lead also lacked opportunities and were fortunate that the military gave them opportunities for a middle-class lifestyle.

To say they “lacked brainpower” is NOT accurate. But since that is the way the elites of this country have been talking about poorer people in this country, it’s less of a surprise you see Bernie and Trump doing well. Trump blends this message with white nationalism, which is what’s so scary. Bernie addresses this problem with an activist government, which parallels the Progressive Era’s answer to the 19th century Gilded Age.

Trump may be a modern Il Duce, Bernie may be a modern day William Jennings Bryan, and hopefully Hilary can be a modern Teddy Roosevelt.

Similarly on the machinist question, from a reader in the west. She writes:

Of all the Trump defenders, the one who disturbed me the most was the person who disparaged the machinist. Machinists are highly skilled workers without whom a sophisticated and diverse economy can’t exist. [JF: Yes, this is part of what we’ve been chronicling around the country.]

We need them just as much if not more than we need people with
graduate degrees in computer and electrical engineering. Maybe he
should explain why a skilled worker shouldn’t expect to earn a wage
that allows for a middle class life?

But it sounds like he has just gotten his graduate degree; maybe in a few years he will learn that he is just as expendable as the machinist he sneers at. He reminds me most of the old NPR short called “Ask Dr. Science.” The end of every segment where Dr. Science mangles some issue has him claiming “I have a master’s degree, pause, in science!”

Readers weigh in about this next stage in American democracy. Previous entries are all collected on the page you’re reading now.

Trump did save me a lot of money! From a male reader who now lives in New Jersey, who ends up arguing that I should “vote for Bozo,” ie Trump:

First, to establish some anti-Trump bona fides:

I moved to the Lower East Side (and then the Upper West Side) from Florida in 1979. I very quickly learned to loath Trump as a blight upon the city.

And why is Trump different from Hitler? Hitler wrote his own book; Trump hasn't read his. (In fairness, the same could be said of Hillary.)

I must add, though, that Trump did save me a lot of money. I figured, if a billionaire like Trump can't afford a decent hairpiece, why should I waste my money? So I'm bald. Or, as my wife puts it, gleefully bald.

Finally, we can take it as a given that Trump will be a terrible, horrible disaster of Biblical proportions [allusion to Ghostbusters] as President…

So, why not worry?

Two reasons. First, the US does not have the systemic weaknesses of Italy, Germany, and Russia after WWI. [JF note: Yes, agree, this is under-appreciated point. The Weimar Germany of the 1920s was a disaster economically and in its first fledgling days as a democracy, soon to perish democratically and in other ways under Hitler.]

Second, Obama -- even with the whole-hearted, full-throated, rapturously unskeptical support of most of the media, nearly all of academia, and two years of legislative majorities -- was unable, in the end, completely to "fundamentally transform" America. And Trump (Trump!?) is supposed to be able to do so with all three of those groups against him (and the courts besides)? Not happening.

That's why, if I'm faced with a choice between, on the one hand, a candidate calling for a "people's revolution" [JF: I’m guessing this is Bernie Sanders] or one who is both a congenital liar and the willing tool of anyone who has a million or so bucks to spare [guessing this is HRC] (either of whom would have nearly the same level of support from my betters as Obama) and, on the other, a reincarnation of Bozo sans the red nose, I'm voting for Bozo.

An earlier reader correctly stated that "[c]onservatives leaders need to stop taking these [economically left-behind] groups for granted. Liberals should see them as a group that deserves attention and outreach. This needs to happen after Trump—otherwise we will repeat history in 4 or 8 years."

I believe this to be a correct assessment in many ways; the GOP has never, in my voting lifetime (20+ years) had what I'd call "a domestic policy program" that came close to anything the Dems have had. The Democratic domestic program over the years has been scattershot, perhaps, but at the base of it: "helping people out whatever holes they're in."...

I have talked with a friend who is the one rabid Trump supporter I know. I find his certainty in Trump's eventual nomination and election baffling, but not surprising….

I pointed out to him that the last time 'outsiders' won their party nominations over establishment candidates, the electoral results were disastrous: Goldwater in '64, and McGovern in '72. This didn't matter to him, and I was lectured on the Democratic Party's 150 years of using minorities to simply get votes, etc….

It is this "suspension of logic borne of intuition" that I find so frustrating...and troubling.

As far as Trump, if he becomes the nominee, being an unknown/ untested candidate against a presumptive Hillary Clinton candidacy, I think HRC would do herself a favor by simply speaking generally about the GOP and its candidate, and not even deigning to "debate" him where he could bully and bluff his way into "winning" any such event. Deny Trump the limelight, and he'd wither. Let surrogates call him out by name and sling the mud.

***

It’s not narcissism. It’s something much worse. From a reader in the Midwest, in response to a previous note offering an arm’s-length diagnosis of Trump as manifesting narcissistic personality disorder:

Interesting take on the Donald - yes he is narcissistic, but it's actually much worse than that. I believe he's also Character Disordered. When people are character disordered their basic belief system is that they are never wrong, or to blame for anything that they might do that goes wrong. It's always everybody else's fault.

The big problem with this psychosis is that it's very difficult to treat. If you are always right, then what is there to change?

I wrote back to this reader, saying that I did not know about “Character Disorder” and wondered if it was a real thing. He said, yes indeed, and pointed to discussions like this (emphasis added):

Most disturbed characters don’t hear that little voice in their heads that urge most of us to do right or admonish most of us when we’re contemplating doing wrong. They don’t “push” themselves to take on responsibilities and don’t “arrest” themselves when they want something they shouldn’t have. Any qualms of conscience they might experience can be eliminated with great ease. In the most severe disturbances of character (i.e. the psychopath or sociopath), conscience is not simply weak, underdeveloped, or flawed, but can be absent altogether.

It’s really hard to fathom and accept that there are people in this world who simply don’t have the same degree capacity most of us have to be inwardly troubled when they contemplate doing things that are potentially very harmful to others or even themselves.

***

“I will not be voting in the general.” From a reader who works in the defense industry, on the shape of this year’s race. He is responding especially to this post, in which I quoted some obscene and snarling pro-Trump messages:

One of the downsides of the Internet is where one can be fairly anonymous, people often give themselves permission to behave poorly. The comment board of The Atlantic, for example, is quite insalubrious.

Another example is Buzz Mitchell's message to you. [“James, you are a pathetic little dickhead” etc.] One of the most valuable lessons I've learned in my short life is just because you're thinking something, or you want to do something, that doesn't mean you should say it or do it.

It's also clear that Buzz and the machinist [also quoted in that post] have immersed themselves in the bubble that Conservatism Inc's. lucrative media complex has created. One can exist in this bubble and be blissfully unaware of what is truly going on in the country or in the world.

The machinist, in particular, uses buzzwords like "Jonathon Gruber", but how much do you want to bet the machinist is not aware that the same "Jonathon Gruber" was instrumental in implementing healthcare reform in the home state of the last GOP presidential candidate for that GOP governor? Or that the ACA was first proposed by the Heritage Foundation back in the late 80's?...

Circling back to my first point -- civility or lack thereof -- one of the things we as a nation appear to be losing is a sense of self- responsibility. Rod Dreher over at The American Conservative had a great blog earlier today that touched on that topic.

Speaking for myself, I completed a masters program in electrical and computer engineering three years ago. Statistically speaking at this point in my life, I have academic and professional credentials that most Americans would kill for.

But it didn't happen by accident, James. Graduate school in the hard sciences is brutal, and it has a way of culling out the weak. But I hung in there, worked hard, and it's paid off. It doesn't matter if Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is POTUS one year from now because given my career trajectory, I'm going to earn a good amount of money.

What I'm sure the machinist in particular is in denial about is a President Trump will ameliorate his present situation of only earning $45,000 a year. It won't, for wage stagnation amongst the working class and income inequality has been an issue long before Barack Obama became president….

It's worth saying that it is not Obama's or the hated establishment's fault that the machinist is earning only $45,000 a year. I realize not everyone can be an electrical engineer, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or a businessman. I'm incredibly fortunate to have the brainpower I have in order to do what I do. But as I've said, James, I've had to work hard and pay a price to get to where I am.

Without knowing the machinist, I can tell you that a lot of people don't want to pay the necessary price to get to where they want to be because, frankly, it's too hard. At some point, people have to take ownership of their own futures. Government can help towards that end (I took out federal loans for my undergraduate EE degree), and it should. But it is folly to blame any incumbent president for one's own life circumstances.

NB: For the record, I will likely not be voting in the general. Trump is an unelectable authoritarian, and Hillary Clinton (assuming she puts Bernie Sanders down) is untrustworthy for a myriad of reasons aside from her not inconsiderable baggage. You may refer to me as an engineer who works on DoD programs for a large defense contractor.

We may be past the point where it matters to wonder why Donald Trump does the things he does. Instead we can just note that he does them. As I’ve argued before, his virtuosity in being able to switch almost instantly from bombast to talk-show charm is an important part of his success.

A reader makes what may by now be an obvious point but is still worth reckoning with. He was responding to the post in which I noted Trump’s combination of masterful TV performance and near-total ignorance of the actual job and challenges of being president. Emphasis added:

I'm a clinical psychology doctoral candidate about a year away from graduation, and I think that there's actually a psychological explanation for Trump's ignorance.

Normally I wouldn't diagnose someone without spending time with them in a 1-on-1 interview, or without speaking to people who are close to them and who are reliable reporters, or without some kind of objective data collected from empirically supported psychological tests, but I think it's safe to say that Donald Trump is really and truly a narcissist, in the personality disorder sense.

I think that Donald Trump's ignorance is a manifestation of his narcissism. Trump hasn't bothered to educate himself about outside issues because, to him, everything he says is automatically true. Why learn about something that you believe you've already mastered?

Let’s stop to note Trump’s relevant quote today on Morning Joe. Who does Trump rely on for foreign-policy guidance, he was asked? “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.” Back to the reader.

Imagine going through life with the conceptual framework that you simply cannot be wrong. Facts would cease to matter, and education would largely be irrelevant, because you're the one who determines what is and isn't true. In fact, people who claim to have expertise would become the enemy because they would provide information that would exist outside of yourself. If everything you say is the ultimate, universal truth, than anything that exists outside of yourself must be deception.

I think that Trump earnestly believes every single thing that comes out of his mouth, and that the reason his beliefs seem to change is because his reality is fluid.

When Trump claimed that he had refuted David Duke he really believed it, because in his world he is infallible. When, in the reality the rest of us share, he clearly did not refuse David Duke's endorsement and instead said that he doesn't even know who David Duke was, that was also true, because he believed it to be true.

For Donald Trump there's no need to convince him that, as in George Orwell's novel 1984, 2+2=5, because for him 2+2 equals whatever he currently believes it equals. He seems earnest because he really is an earnest guy, and he refuses to work on his ignorance because he deeply, genuinely believes that he's right, about everything, all of the time. I think that he feels attacked because he lacks the capacity to understand that the rest of us don't subscribe to his own version of reality.

The likely Republican nominee, after his victories last night (Joe Skipper / Reuters)

Further on the Trump phenomenon, for good and bad.

The left-behinds. A reader argues that Trump has given a voice to people who thought they were unheard and invisible:

I am currently in California looking after my 99 year old mother and consequently watching more television than I’ve seen in a long time. It’s been interesting to see just how blindsided the talking class has been (and to a large degree still is) by the rise of Trump.

Pundits scratch their heads, “Didn’t see that comin’” but I’m sure that you, in your travels across America, are aware that there are many, many people who have been left behind by the “recovery.” A stroll through the WalMart in the city where I live (Santa Fe) tells me that.
Both parties have let our working classes down by sidestepping an inconvenient truth that is self-evident to them: this economy doesn’t need them. They are expendable. I’m not sure I know enough about how other countries feel about work but I know in this country when a man (and I’m concentrating on men here because I am one and because I think this is primarily a male problem) is out of work there is a profound loss of identity. For some time now we’ve had an economy where the role of the breadwinner has been shared by men and women and I think, in the talking classes, men have adapted to this paradigm. I don’t think this is the case for working class men.

This fall I read Joe Bageant’s book, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War, which opened my eyes (and heart) to people I would not normally have given much thought to: working class men and women from Winchester, Virginia, Joe’s hometown. To put it bluntly, these are not my people but Joe paints a sympathetic portrait of men and women who have paid the real price of our current economy, the ones who get knocked to the ground when corporate decisions are made far, far from their doorsteps. These are people who are seen as consumers or digits on a spreadsheet. And when they are no longer valued as “assets” they disappear entirely from our radar.

And clearly, until Trump galvanized them, they have been (and to a large degree remain) invisible to the talking classes and, perhaps, more crucially, to themselves. The parade of shiny, happy people my mother sees on her TV in commercials and the shows themselves do not reflect the circumstances of their lives and when they do it is often in reality tv shows where their antics are remarkable only because they are so odd to the talking classes. They are fodder for entertainment.

From this perspective any appeals to reason, ideology, true Christian values or whatever, will fall on deaf ears. Trump has made them visible to the talking classes and to themselves. They will not be denied.

I’d like to say one more thing that seems critical to me. Capitalism takes care of the talking classes in a way most of us take for granted: it confers dignity to their labors. There might have been a time when a man who worked with his hands could also count on that as well but not in my memory.

The phrase that keeps recurring to me is this one: “a place at the table.” This is what working class men and women have not had in some time.

***

He doesn’t really want to win. From an American reader in Asia:

I've been enjoying Trump's show from abroad after living in Japan the last few years... For what it's worth here's my guess how this plays out:

Trump knows he won't beat Clinton absent divine intervention (a real scandal, a perfect storm of an independent run), so he'll wait until the last moment and then instruct his delegates to support someone else... someone who checks the boxes of (1) palatable to establishment GOP, (2) credible general election candidate, (3) shares Trump's calls-it-likes-he-sees-it-ness (phony as it may be), and most importantly (4) promises Trump the moon in return.

Trump's brand depends on his reputation of not being a loser (phony as it may be). He's shown no interest in actually running a general election campaign -- no interest in the issues, no fundraising, no campaign. If he wants to maximize the return on his investment, this is the safest course.

Note that in this universe, Christie's endorsement actually makes sense.

No, really, winning would be bad for him. From an American reader in New York:

If you want to compare Trump to an athlete, he's not Muhammad Ali so much as the guy at the YMCA who swears he can make a shot from half court. It's a lot more fun to see him talk about it than to watch him try to do it.

I think it's possible that Trump could win a general election. (I switched parties so I could vote for Kasich in the NY primary next month for just that reason.) But it's worth asking if Trump could ever be reelected in 2020. [JF note: thinking about 2016 is enough for me.]

It seems like Trump's appeal lies in the ambiguity of what his policies would be. It's easier to run on vague promises than an actual track record. After Iowa, most of the punditry I read was about how losing would sink Trump. But it seems like winning in 2016 would be the end...

***

This is less amusing than it seems. From a reader in California, who makes a surprisingly precise comparison between The Donald and Il Duce:

This is in response to the reader from Europe who asserts that Trump is not a fascist and that the US would be better off as a direct democracy.

As a resident of California, I've seen some of the problems (that of course you already know) about direct democracy. On the more immediately impending issue: of course, we can't tell yet whether Trump is a full-fledged fascist. But do we want to put him in power and find out? The Italian historian Roberto Vivarelli's description of Mussolini's rise could have been written today about Trump [JF: emphasis added]:

“From the very beginning, for example, the relation between words and deeds among Mussolini and his followers was very peculiar, and words were used not to state any firm conviction, nor to outline a definite political program but, rather, to arouse emotions that would generate support for a changeable line of action.

“Language, that is, was used by fascists not as an instrument of persuasion but as a means of deception. As a result, the fascist movement from its inception presented itself as a purely political phenomenon-that is to say, as a movement created for action which acquired national relevance through a skillfully executed plan ending with the seizure of power. But when in October 1922 Mussolini became Italy's prime minister, his contemporaries had no idea of what was in store for them. There was no such thing as a fascist blueprint for government, simply because fascism was not an intellectual movement with anything comparable to a doctrine; and, in fact, among the fascist rank and file one finds at that time the most bizarre and varied collection of people.”

This is from Vivarelli's article "Interpretations of the Origins of Fascism," in the Journal of Modern History 63 (March 1991), 30.

Team Kasich celebrating their Ohio win, on an evening that moved the country closer to a Trump-Clinton general election. (Aaron Josefczyk / Reuters)

As this evening’s results move us closer to (probably) a Clinton-Trump general election campaign, here’s a range of reader reactions on Trump. These follow the other items now collected in this thread, and this earlier post about the tabula rasa that is Trump’s public-policy mind. Here we go:

Trump as Muhammad Ali. A reader explains why Trump’s disconnection from any specific policy views might be a governing liability but has been an electoral asset:

I suspect that Trump’s surprising ignorance and lack of policy positions is a feature not a bug. Untethered to facts or positions and thus not having to defend them, he can claim anything and attack anyone from any direction, as the opportunity arises.

His is the Muhammad Ali approach applied to politics:

“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The hands can't hit what the eyes can't see.”

Let’s leap ahead: what if Trump loses? Several readers have begun worrying about this consequence.

I fear that if/when Trump is beaten back, people will "relax" and forget that the hardest work is still ahead—reaching people who feel so isolated and disempowered, and bringing them “into the fold” of empowered groups that feel they have a true voice in DC. That starts, partly, by not treating people who live in trailers as trash. Poor whites are a safe target in politics, even though their access to power is as limited as that of many minority groups.

Conservatives leaders need to stop taking these groups for granted. Liberals should see them as a group that deserves attention and outreach. This needs to happen after Trump—otherwise we will repeat history in 4 or 8 years.

Also in the what if he loses? category, from an American reader who has lived for many years in Japan:

I think the key phrase to the recent post, Trump Supporters Make Their Case, is your summation, “and then we’ll have to deal with the aftermath.” No matter how the primary cum election plays out, there will be a group seething at the results. I guess the closest parallel to this coming November are the `64 and `72 elections where depending on party affiliation and political inclination, a large group of the electorate viewed the Republicans & Goldwater and the Democrats & McGovern as nutcases … and the winners, Johnson and Nixon, as viewed by the losing groups, were out to destroy America.

Well, actually, Nixon was out to destroy America, anyhow, we did muddle on.

I looked up the `64 and `72 election results, both had an approximate 60% / 40% split for the vote. Although an election landslide, still, 40% is a sizable block of voters that choose what is now viewed as extremist candidates (my political inclination says that Goldwater was truly on the extreme right and labeling McGovern as his mirror image is a bit of false equivalence, but trying to see things from both sides).

I remember the Nixon years and the bitterness that some Republicans felt at his ouster, some say that Clinton`s impeachment was payback. What I am asking you and your readers is how did the Goldwater defeat go down to those that supported him, I was 6 at the time so I do not remember. Johnson was able to pass the Great Society legislation (and I think he did that with some bipartisan support). If only he did not feel the need to placate the hawks what a different nation we would have had, maybe, or were the Reagan Republicans as angry as the present cohort but minus the internet/talk radio bullhorns.

In other words, how are we not going to tear ourselves apart at the seams (even though the bounty that constitutes the US as seen from afar - Japan - makes this whole B grade opera feel absurd)

And finally in the what if he loses? vein:

Many people wonder what will happen if Trump gets the nomination. Most anti-Trump people seem to be confident that he will lose, though there is a real fear on the part of some people that he might win. My big fear is what will happen if he does lose, which is not something I feel like many people are addressing. I used to have a Tea Party friend who’s now a fervent Trump supporter. I am sure that he’s convinced Trump will win the presidency, and that belief will only get stronger if Trump gets the nomination. I am sure many Trump supporters will feel validated if he gets the nomination, and will be sure he will win. I wonder what their reaction will be if he’s defeated. Will they feel like the election is illegitimate. Even if they’re willing to accept that he legitimately lost, I wonder if they will take that as a sign that they have truly lost this country, and will then start getting desperate.

I don’t think people are quite worried enough about what might happen IF Trump loses. It could get a whole lot uglier in the next few years than people are imagining.

***

Another next-step question: what about a veep? A reader asks:

One thing I have yet to see discussed anywhere is the question of Donald Trump's VP choice. I ask because the whole idea of naming a VP seems completely contrary to Trump's messaging.

A Vice President is a contingency that the President will be unable to do his or her job: has such a thought ever entered Trump's head? How could he share the spotlight with someone who isn't Trump? A second name just dilutes the brand: there simply isn't room. I can only conclude Trump will name himself as his VP.

Interesting question: who would he want on the ticket, and who would accept?

Now, back to his argument. What about the Switzerland comparison? A reader responds to a previous reader argument that the U.S. needs to organize itself the way the tidy Swiss do:

The one from Switzerland may have disturbed me more than the others, even. The idea that democracy = tyranny of the majority is pretty frightening (some peoples’ rights might be curtailed but so what?)

Oy.

Also, the idea that the President doesn’t have to know anything.

See: Dubya (but even he had some experience as a real life governor and came from a political family!)

I rest my case.

And more on the Swiss angle:

I just read the opinion of your reader from Europe with interest as a US citizen residing in Switzerland.

The idea that the Swiss system of direct democracy is what the US needs is interesting to be kind.

I suppose that this could suppress any cult of personality that surrounds candidates in the US, but would it really create more trust in government? Switzerland, without the benefit of a charismatic leader, has passed stringent anti-immigrant laws promoted by extreme parties through popular votes and continues to attempt to pass more. If the Swiss minority in these votes "shuts it" and accepts the vote, doing so has not calmed the frightened populists in the country.

Unfortunately, the real Trump problem isn't simply the fact that Donald Trump could win the US presidential election. The full scope of the problem is that similar issues seem to exist in most developed countries - likely as part of the long hangover from the financial crisis. As your colleague reported recently there are "Little Trumps" all over Europe.

On the other hand, a lance the boil argument. From someone who has been a military officer during the recent wars:

I want him as the nominee. It seems like, if he isn't then the Republicans just have this same problem again in four years, and worse.

Picking Trump tells the right, this is where they are and they have to start working to make the party different if that's what they want. Picking Rubio tells them, there was absolutely totally nothing wrong with the Bush years, which is just wrong. And Cruz wants them to believe, despite all available evidence, that there is a sleeping giant of far-right evangelical voters who form a significant American plurality and want no more concession of any kind on their core issues and instincts, which is a disastrous misconception both for his party _and_ for the country.

The Republicans should be doing a "this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine" and prepping for the convention.

***

What it means for the industry. From a former political-science professor who has worked on Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon:

I offer these observations on how unusual Trump's campaign is.

As a political scientist who has worked in several campaigns over the years, I have been astounded that Trump has largely failed to utilize the political consultant industry and its tools and has succeeded in winning voters despite his flouting of the candidate's code of conduct.

Political consultants have expertise in buying TV ads, in microtargeting people for ads and turnout efforts, in branding and message discipline—which have made the difference in numerous campaigns over the years. So far as I can tell, Trump isn't using these people, isn't using much paid TV, isn't building a ground game—because he can win without it.

Everybody has been surprised by his ability to manipulate the media and dominate news coverage by tweets and phone calls, but it has worked. He has not followed the traditional media campaign of paid ads, themed speeches, and infrequent press availabilities.

The whole pundit class has been amazed that Trump can get away with behaviors that used to destroy previous candidates: personal insults, lies, changing positions, ignoring what he labels political correctness but the rest of us see as civility. These deviations from the standard code of conduct haven't cost him many votes.

What this means for the presidential race is that Clinton must run against a candidate using new and unexpected behaviors, and it's far from clear that her playbook responses will work against such an untraditional candidate.

America has never had a demagogue as a serious presidential candidate since the television era began in 1952. Huey Long was like that in the 1930s, and might have dethroned FDR if he hadn't been killed in 1935. George Wallace was a demagogue, but on a single issue with only regional appeal. Trump has found issues that resonate across geography and ideology. And voters are so distrustful of what politicians say that they don't hold Trump's outrageous comments against him. They even enjoy them because they're refreshingly different.

Trump at a rally on March 13. By the way, America is already great again. (Joe Skipper / Reuters)

In these past few days I’ve argued that Donald Trump is an increasingly impressive political performer, whose lack of substantive knowledge on public issues is increasingly obvious. He keeps saying “we’re going to win again” and “it’s going to be great” because that’s all he knows to say about anything involving what a president does. Three installments to this effect are here, here, and here.

For the other side, a sample of reader mail defending Trump. First, from a reader in Europe, a “shake things up” / “intensify the contradictions” argument:

I think I would vote for Trump.
- what American politics needs is radical change. Hillary won't bring that. Bernie is too weak to deliver.
- he would probably really split the Republican Party. Maybe leading to a multi-party system?
- said that Bush lied the country and the world to war.
- does not unquestioningly take the Israeli side.
- he is not a fascist, racist, white supremacist. Wall or no wall.

I wrote back saying: thanks for laying this out, but I disagree for many reasons, among them that Trump does not know anything about either domestic or international policy, choices, problems, goals. The European replied:

I understand. But I believe it is irrelevant. The position of president was never meant to be as powerful as it is today. The country should be rueld by a functioning Senate and Congress.

What America needs is direct democracy where people can vote on issues directly, like in Switzerland. There is no place for riots and violence in such a system, because it gets settled with a vote. If the majority agrees, then the rest has to shut it. Even if the decision is very controversial and might limit some people's rights. It happens all the time in Switzerland. But decisions also get reversed in subsequent votes. And with some issues, like repealing mandatory military service, they vote on it every 10-15 years. Always with the same outcome.

The point is that people actually have a direct voice and what the majority decides actually happens. I think in today's America most of the "elite" and the politically left-leaning there is a lack of trust in the people and their ability to make sane decisions.

The result is Trump.

Again, Hilary will not change this. Trump is just so disruptive that it might lead to some actual change.

For the record, I find this unpersuasive, the kind of thought-experiment that might seem “interesting” from Europe but not if you’re in the middle of it here. Still, offered for the record.

“When are you hypocrites going to question your own party?” A more common theme in pro-Trump mail is anger at the hypocrisy of the press in general and me in specific. A polite version:

Got it. You hate Trump. That’s very clear. I'm no fan either. But I'm still waiting for one of you media elites to step up and say, “I cannot support a pathological liar corrupted by an insatiable thirst for power who abandoned four American to protect a political campaign.” [JF note: for those in doubt, he is talking about Hillary Clinton.]

How about it James? Can you spot a phoney regardless of party? Or is your indignation only in one direction? I think I know the answer.

The less polite alternative:

James you are a pathetic little dickhead
Crawl back in your wigger rat hole
Continue to write slime propaganda and I suspect it will catch up with you
Buzz Mitchell
American

And in essay-question form:

While I might agree that the disavowal of Donald Trump may be a wise thing for Republicans and especially conservatives to do, as his statements seem not presidential, bellicose, and needlessly insulting to many. I would also ask, will you write a similar article suggesting Democrats or Progressives, disavow Hillary Clinton, for actions that break the law, that enrich herself and family though using her position and former positions in government, for her unjustifiable role in attacks and smears against women her husband had sexually abused, and for her constant and conspicuous and ubiquitous dishonestly?

When I see such an article from The Atlantic, or any of the plethora of similar leftist magazine articles which show up on my Yahoo browser page daily, then I might agree that you have a valid point about candidates declaring they won’t support Donald Trump. Otherwise, Mr Trump’s possible nomination and election does not seem any more disastrous than Ms. Clinton’s.

***

Here’s a long message that combines views of the press and the political establishment with complaints about the economy. I’m not taking the time to copy-edit the whole thing, because generally I don’t do that with reader mail. Also, the style of presentation is part of the message.

The reader starts by objecting to my claim that Trump, successful as he may have been in business, is shockingly ignorant about public affairs.

So a stupid and ignorant person can build and own towers, casinos, have many businesses, and employ thousands simultaneously. Realy? Use your brain idiot. So anyone can do this according to your logic?

Either your the ignoramous for writing an entire article on something that has zero logic to it or your part of the liberal lieing propaganda machine taking advantage of the stupid american voters that Jonathon Gruber was refering to. Which would mean your just pure evil like Obama, whom only got elcted on lies and broken promises directed towards stupid and ignorant voters.

Example of Lies:

"If you like your healthcare plan you can keep it"- No, that put a bunch of new requirement on mandatory plans so that was a blatant lie. The new cadilac tax that was imposeed on small busninesses by his plan is why I lost mine. Went from paying $116 a month with $500 deductibale through my employer, kicked to the private sector paying $265 a month with a $1800 deductable. Which brings me to the next monstrous lie.

"The cost of healthcare annual increase will slow to the lowest levels in american history" -That the lie from hell. That same silver plan from Blue Cross Blue Shield was gonna increase from $265 to $430 this year if I would have kept it. That's a 62% increase from one year to the next. You tell me any year in the history of our nation healthcare has gone up that much? It hasn't! Now I'm a average income machinist making $45000 a year that ony has a catastrophic plan and paying $216 a month. How is that improved healthcare for middle class amaerca?

"The average american family will save $2500 a year on healthcare under my plan"- The above explains what a lieing crock of shit that is.

"I'm gonna bring hope and change to a disfuntional Washington"- This was his main theme during his first campaign. When you start your time in office overhauling the entire healthcare system in america and ramming down everyones throats with out even enough time for Congress to read it not to mention reach across the isles to discuss it, you set a precidence of divided politics. What did Polosi say" You have to pass it to see what's in it"? Can you get anymore divisive that this move? How many time hasn't he stated to give him what he want or he'll shut the government down? He's one elected official. Congress are hundreds of representative elected by the american people. Government has never been more divided as it is now and it's directly because of him.

"Al-Queda is at it's lowest levels of activity and on the run" Part of his debate statements just prior to the last election. Then Bengazi happens a few weeks later and he has to make up another lie to cover this one. NBot a single human being that was in Libya that day said there was a single deminstartion. I remenber on CNN a Libayan official came out the next day in an interveiw and said there were no demonstration going on. It's been a complete fabrication by this administration from day one and average joe me can see that. Terrorism around the world has gotten at least 10 time as bad since he's taken office under his polices. Another major ass deception to the american public to get re-elected.

Above are 5 examples of massive blatant lies by this administration towards us american voters that I remember thinking how great that would be if it is as he says. Finding out the facts later and him being one big fraud to the american public. Or at least the stupid and ignorant ones.

My opinion on the Trump rise against you whom don't understand. Middle class america is pissed about being misled on a massive scale with no accountability. Democrats have lied and told us everything we want to hear(which Hillary and Bernie are doing now). Republicans have been rolling over and letting them get away with it. Trump don't need to be bought and he isn't telling everyone all the nicey nice things that they want to hear. He won't put up with the lieing crap on either side of the isle.

Example- You see Hillary in the last month or so address the african american community and telling them everything they want to hear so the agree with everything she say. Prior to running she never talked that way. Good indication she's another Obama and just filling the american voters full of crap.

Just a middle class average income hard working american tired of the lieng BS by politicians and the press,thats tired of making less and having it given to those whom worked less and sacrificed less to get by. America became great without free healthcare and college. We've had to pay our way though life, why should others get a free ride. One sides bought mainly by big lobbyist, the other side just is plain bought by american tax dollars thru entitlements. Bernie just don't get that socialism isn't gonna make everyone wealthier. History don't lie so that sorta leaves Trump now doesn't it?

[I’ve removed the name, but it’s from a real person in Wisconsin]

Machinist

Nearly eight months to go, and then we’ll have to deal with the aftermath.

The president has been intervening in the process of producing a border wall, on behalf of a favored firm.

Many of the tales of controversy to emerge from the Trump administration have been abstract, or complicated, or murky. Whenever anyone warns about destruction of “norms,” the conversation quickly becomes speculative—the harms are theoretical, vague, and in the future.

This makes new Washington Post reporting about President Donald Trump’s border wall especially valuable. The Post writes about how Trump has repeatedly pressured the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Homeland Security to award a contract for building a wall at the southern U.S. border to a North Dakota company headed by a leading Republican donor.

The story demonstrates the shortcomings of Trump’s attempt to bring private-sector techniques into government. It shows his tendency toward cronyism, his failures as a negotiator, and the ease with which a fairly primitive attention campaign can sway him. At heart, though, what it really exemplifies is Trump’s insistence on placing performative gestures over actual efficacy. And it is a concrete example—almost literally—of how the president’s violations of norms weaken the country and waste taxpayer money.

In theory, Amazon is a site meant to serve the needs of humans. The mega-retailer’s boundless inventory gives people easy access to household supplies and other everyday products that are rarely fun to shop for. Most people probably aren’t eager to buy clothes hangers, for instance. They just want to have hangers when they need them.

But when you type hangers into Amazon’s search box, the mega-retailer delivers “over 200,000” options. On the first page of results, half are nearly identical velvet hangers, and most of the rest are nearly identical plastic. They don’t vary much by price, and almost all of the listings in the first few pages of results have hundreds or thousands of reviews that average out to ratings between four and five stars. Even if you have very specific hanger needs and preferences, there’s no obvious choice. There are just choices.

“Every classmate who became a teacher or doctor seemed happy,” and 29 other lessons from seeing my Harvard class of 1988 all grown up

On the weekend before the opening gavel of what’s being dubbed the Harvard affirmative-action trial, a record-breaking 597 of my fellow members of the class of ’88 and I, along with alumni from other reunion classes, were seated in a large lecture hall, listening to the new president of Harvard, Lawrence Bacow, address the issue of diversity in the admissions process. What he said—and I’m paraphrasing, because I didn’t record it—was that he could fill five whole incoming classes with valedictorians who’d received a perfect score on the SAT, but that’s not what Harvard is or will ever be. Harvard tries—and succeeds, to my mind—to fill its limited spots with a diversity not only of race and class but also of geography, politics, interests, intellectual fields of study, and worldviews.

An ancient faith is disappearing from the lands in which it first took root. At stake is not just a religious community, but the fate of pluralism in the region.

T

he call came in 2014, shortly after Easter. Four years earlier, Catrin Almako’s family had applied for special visas to the United States. Catrin’s husband, Evan, had cut hair for the U.S. military during the early years of its occupation of Iraq. Now a staffer from the International Organization for Migration was on the phone. “Are you ready?” he asked. The family had been assigned a departure date just a few weeks away.

“I was so confused,” Catrin told me recently. During the years they had waited for their visas, Catrin and Evan had debated whether they actually wanted to leave Iraq. Both of them had grown up in Karamles, a small town in the historic heart of Iraqi Christianity, the Nineveh Plain. Evan owned a barbershop near a church. Catrin loved her kitchen, where she spent her days making pastries filled with nuts and dates. Their families lived there: her five siblings and aging parents, his two brothers.

SpaceX and its competitors plan to envelop the planet with thousands of small objects in the next few years.

In 1957, a beach-ball-shaped satellite hurtled into the sky and pierced the invisible line between Earth and space. As it rounded the planet, Sputnik drew an unseen line of its own, splitting history into distinct parts—before humankind became a spacefaring species, and after. “Listen now for the sound that will forevermore separate the old from the new,” one NBC broadcaster said in awe, and insistent that others join him. He played the staccato call from the satellite, a gentle beep beep beep.

Decades later, we are not as impressed with satellites. There have been thousands of other Sputniks. Instead of earning front-page stories, satellites stitch together the hidden linings of our daily lives, providing and powering too many basic functions to list. They form a kind of exoskeleton around Earth, which is growing thicker every year with each new launch.

Uber was the most valuable private company in history, but the public market has not been as enthusiastic. The reason explains a lot about how the tech industry works.

Uber is now a massive, publicly traded company. Anyone can buy Uber shares at a valuation of about $70 billion. This isn’t bad for a company losing billions of dollars a year, but it’s a fraction of the $120-billion valuation the IPO’s bankers initially floated. It’s roughly what private investors valued it at three years ago, when the company made $7.43 billion less revenue.

In its later seasons, the show started relying on heavy-handed historical references to do the difficult work of character-building.

When Game of Thrones ended its eight-year run on Sunday, the series finale, titled “The Iron Throne,” received a largely negative critical response. Many writers pointed out that the show’s last season had given up on the careful character-building of Thrones’ early days—a problem that, in truth, had started a few years back. The result was a seemingly rushed conclusion where multiple characters made poorly justified decisions and important story lines felt only halfway developed.

The show made plenty of mistakes in its final episode, but among the most significant was Thrones’ abrupt and uncharacteristic turn to moralizing—and its use of heavy-handed allusions to 20th-century history to do so. Characters who were once morally complicated, whose actions fit within well-developed personal motivations and fueled the show’s gripping political drama, became mechanisms to bring the story to a hasty, unearned conclusion. Characters like Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister—previously complex and fully formed—became, in “The Iron Throne,” mere tools in the service of a plodding message about the dangers of totalitarianism.

The president directed his attorney general to declassify information—raising the prospect of selective disclosures.

President Donald Trump can only escalate. He cannot help it.

On Thursday night, he spread from his own presidential account a video of the speaker of the House, edited to splice together moments when she stumbled over her words, in an apparent effort to deceive people into thinking her drunk or ill. In 2016, Trump’s Russian supporters performed this service for him with faked videos of Hillary Clinton. Now he seems to have decided that if you want a dirty-tricks campaign done right, you must do it yourself.

At the same time, he has put the declassification powers of the presidency to work as part of a larger campaign of cover-up.

Trump directed his attorney general to declassify documents in an effort to depict Trump’s campaign as a victim of improper surveillance in 2016. Trump tweeted that the attorney general had “requested” these powers. That may even be true. But Trump has been demanding such an investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies since long before William Barr got the top law-enforcement job. Barr is compliant and complicit, but the idea is all Trump’s.

The White House can’t end the conflict by expecting one side to surrender unconditionally.

Is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fundamentally about land and territory? It is certainly partly about that. But when you hear the objections and grievances of both sides, the issue of who has what part of which territory doesn’t necessarily figure all that prominently.

I recently took part in a study tour on religion and nationalism in Israel organized by the Philos Project. One Palestinian official whom we met told us, “I’m not going to compromise my dignity.”

The problem with what we know of the Trump administration’s “peace plan” is that it asks Palestinians to do precisely that. The entire Trump approach seems to be premised on calling for unilateral surrender. It is premised on destroying the will of a people, and hoping that despair might one day turn into acquiescence. This is the only way to interpret Trump senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s insistence onprioritizing economic incentives over political progress, but this misunderstands most of what we know about human motivation.

If mothers and fathers speak openly about child-care obligations, their colleagues will adapt.

I’m an economist. I love data and evidence. I love them so much that I write books about data-based parenting. When questions arise about how to support parents at work (for example, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter), my first impulse is to endorse paid parental leave. Mountains of data and evidence show that paid leave is good for children’s health, and for mothers in particular. I am more than comfortable making a data-based case for this policy.

But experience, rather than pure data, leads me to believe that what happens after paid leave is nearly as crucial—that is to say, what happens when Mom and Dad return to the office. We need to normalize the experience of parenting while working.

The president has been intervening in the process of producing a border wall, on behalf of a favored firm.

Many of the tales of controversy to emerge from the Trump administration have been abstract, or complicated, or murky. Whenever anyone warns about destruction of “norms,” the conversation quickly becomes speculative—the harms are theoretical, vague, and in the future.

This makes new Washington Post reporting about President Donald Trump’s border wall especially valuable. The Post writes about how Trump has repeatedly pressured the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Homeland Security to award a contract for building a wall at the southern U.S. border to a North Dakota company headed by a leading Republican donor.

The story demonstrates the shortcomings of Trump’s attempt to bring private-sector techniques into government. It shows his tendency toward cronyism, his failures as a negotiator, and the ease with which a fairly primitive attention campaign can sway him. At heart, though, what it really exemplifies is Trump’s insistence on placing performative gestures over actual efficacy. And it is a concrete example—almost literally—of how the president’s violations of norms weaken the country and waste taxpayer money.

In theory, Amazon is a site meant to serve the needs of humans. The mega-retailer’s boundless inventory gives people easy access to household supplies and other everyday products that are rarely fun to shop for. Most people probably aren’t eager to buy clothes hangers, for instance. They just want to have hangers when they need them.

But when you type hangers into Amazon’s search box, the mega-retailer delivers “over 200,000” options. On the first page of results, half are nearly identical velvet hangers, and most of the rest are nearly identical plastic. They don’t vary much by price, and almost all of the listings in the first few pages of results have hundreds or thousands of reviews that average out to ratings between four and five stars. Even if you have very specific hanger needs and preferences, there’s no obvious choice. There are just choices.

“Every classmate who became a teacher or doctor seemed happy,” and 29 other lessons from seeing my Harvard class of 1988 all grown up

On the weekend before the opening gavel of what’s being dubbed the Harvard affirmative-action trial, a record-breaking 597 of my fellow members of the class of ’88 and I, along with alumni from other reunion classes, were seated in a large lecture hall, listening to the new president of Harvard, Lawrence Bacow, address the issue of diversity in the admissions process. What he said—and I’m paraphrasing, because I didn’t record it—was that he could fill five whole incoming classes with valedictorians who’d received a perfect score on the SAT, but that’s not what Harvard is or will ever be. Harvard tries—and succeeds, to my mind—to fill its limited spots with a diversity not only of race and class but also of geography, politics, interests, intellectual fields of study, and worldviews.

An ancient faith is disappearing from the lands in which it first took root. At stake is not just a religious community, but the fate of pluralism in the region.

T

he call came in 2014, shortly after Easter. Four years earlier, Catrin Almako’s family had applied for special visas to the United States. Catrin’s husband, Evan, had cut hair for the U.S. military during the early years of its occupation of Iraq. Now a staffer from the International Organization for Migration was on the phone. “Are you ready?” he asked. The family had been assigned a departure date just a few weeks away.

“I was so confused,” Catrin told me recently. During the years they had waited for their visas, Catrin and Evan had debated whether they actually wanted to leave Iraq. Both of them had grown up in Karamles, a small town in the historic heart of Iraqi Christianity, the Nineveh Plain. Evan owned a barbershop near a church. Catrin loved her kitchen, where she spent her days making pastries filled with nuts and dates. Their families lived there: her five siblings and aging parents, his two brothers.

SpaceX and its competitors plan to envelop the planet with thousands of small objects in the next few years.

In 1957, a beach-ball-shaped satellite hurtled into the sky and pierced the invisible line between Earth and space. As it rounded the planet, Sputnik drew an unseen line of its own, splitting history into distinct parts—before humankind became a spacefaring species, and after. “Listen now for the sound that will forevermore separate the old from the new,” one NBC broadcaster said in awe, and insistent that others join him. He played the staccato call from the satellite, a gentle beep beep beep.

Decades later, we are not as impressed with satellites. There have been thousands of other Sputniks. Instead of earning front-page stories, satellites stitch together the hidden linings of our daily lives, providing and powering too many basic functions to list. They form a kind of exoskeleton around Earth, which is growing thicker every year with each new launch.

Uber was the most valuable private company in history, but the public market has not been as enthusiastic. The reason explains a lot about how the tech industry works.

Uber is now a massive, publicly traded company. Anyone can buy Uber shares at a valuation of about $70 billion. This isn’t bad for a company losing billions of dollars a year, but it’s a fraction of the $120-billion valuation the IPO’s bankers initially floated. It’s roughly what private investors valued it at three years ago, when the company made $7.43 billion less revenue.

In its later seasons, the show started relying on heavy-handed historical references to do the difficult work of character-building.

When Game of Thrones ended its eight-year run on Sunday, the series finale, titled “The Iron Throne,” received a largely negative critical response. Many writers pointed out that the show’s last season had given up on the careful character-building of Thrones’ early days—a problem that, in truth, had started a few years back. The result was a seemingly rushed conclusion where multiple characters made poorly justified decisions and important story lines felt only halfway developed.

The show made plenty of mistakes in its final episode, but among the most significant was Thrones’ abrupt and uncharacteristic turn to moralizing—and its use of heavy-handed allusions to 20th-century history to do so. Characters who were once morally complicated, whose actions fit within well-developed personal motivations and fueled the show’s gripping political drama, became mechanisms to bring the story to a hasty, unearned conclusion. Characters like Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister—previously complex and fully formed—became, in “The Iron Throne,” mere tools in the service of a plodding message about the dangers of totalitarianism.

The president directed his attorney general to declassify information—raising the prospect of selective disclosures.

President Donald Trump can only escalate. He cannot help it.

On Thursday night, he spread from his own presidential account a video of the speaker of the House, edited to splice together moments when she stumbled over her words, in an apparent effort to deceive people into thinking her drunk or ill. In 2016, Trump’s Russian supporters performed this service for him with faked videos of Hillary Clinton. Now he seems to have decided that if you want a dirty-tricks campaign done right, you must do it yourself.

At the same time, he has put the declassification powers of the presidency to work as part of a larger campaign of cover-up.

Trump directed his attorney general to declassify documents in an effort to depict Trump’s campaign as a victim of improper surveillance in 2016. Trump tweeted that the attorney general had “requested” these powers. That may even be true. But Trump has been demanding such an investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies since long before William Barr got the top law-enforcement job. Barr is compliant and complicit, but the idea is all Trump’s.

The White House can’t end the conflict by expecting one side to surrender unconditionally.

Is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fundamentally about land and territory? It is certainly partly about that. But when you hear the objections and grievances of both sides, the issue of who has what part of which territory doesn’t necessarily figure all that prominently.

I recently took part in a study tour on religion and nationalism in Israel organized by the Philos Project. One Palestinian official whom we met told us, “I’m not going to compromise my dignity.”

The problem with what we know of the Trump administration’s “peace plan” is that it asks Palestinians to do precisely that. The entire Trump approach seems to be premised on calling for unilateral surrender. It is premised on destroying the will of a people, and hoping that despair might one day turn into acquiescence. This is the only way to interpret Trump senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s insistence onprioritizing economic incentives over political progress, but this misunderstands most of what we know about human motivation.

If mothers and fathers speak openly about child-care obligations, their colleagues will adapt.

I’m an economist. I love data and evidence. I love them so much that I write books about data-based parenting. When questions arise about how to support parents at work (for example, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter), my first impulse is to endorse paid parental leave. Mountains of data and evidence show that paid leave is good for children’s health, and for mothers in particular. I am more than comfortable making a data-based case for this policy.

But experience, rather than pure data, leads me to believe that what happens after paid leave is nearly as crucial—that is to say, what happens when Mom and Dad return to the office. We need to normalize the experience of parenting while working.